106 A NATURALIST IN HIMALAYA 



out making any attachment at all. Yet the spider toiled 

 deliberately on. Smaller and smaller grew the spiral, 

 stranger and stranger grew the irregularities of its 

 structure, yet the spider, in spite of all its difficulties 

 and mutilations, brought the snare to a completion. 

 But it was of a remarkable workmanship. No one 

 who has contemplated the mathematical accuracy of 

 a circular snare could have looked with indifference 

 on its tangled texture. Its radial and parallel beauty 

 was lost ; threads in confusion adhered to one another ; 

 triangles, quadrilaterals of every shape replaced the 

 perfect symmetry of its parallelograms ; spirals crossed 

 other spirals ; broad and narrow spaces lay indifferently 

 between the turns ; radii were drawn out of shape or 

 were left without attachment ; the web was not 

 a visible harmony but a strange intermingling of 

 confusion and disorder. 



No experiment convinced me so strongly that the 

 fore limbs were the all-important organs of measure- 

 ment to ensure the perfect symmetry of the snare. 



Such are the geometrical powers of the Epeira ; 

 wonderful in their origin, simple in their execution, 

 accurate in their result. Measurement and precision 

 are the secrets of the work. On the possession of 

 these powers, and the instinct to employ them, depend 

 the perfection and beauty of the snare. On its body 

 it carries its organs of measurement the number of 

 its paces, the length of its body, the divergence of its 

 limbs ; the very same organs that, in his rough measure- 

 ments, primitive man might use. Employing those 

 organs with mathematical precision, it weaves that silken 

 texture, every line in harmony making the whole so 

 exquisite in our eyes. Yet underlying the complex 



